This FBI plot is no Agatha Christie-style cozy mystery

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FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok testifies before the House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform during a hearing on “Oversight of FBI and DOJ Actions Surrounding the 2016 Election,” on Capitol Hill, Thursday, July 12, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

It was Agatha Christie who once observed, “Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.”

The late, great mystery writer would have raised an eyebrow at the haul taken in by a particular GoFundMe account this week. In one day, the online fundraising effort for the benefit of newly fired former FBI official Peter Strzok collected more than $300,000.

Something similar happened when the former No. 2 official of the bureau, Andrew McCabe, was fired amid charges that he “lacked candor.” The case was referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for possible criminal charges. A McCabe Legal Defense Fund opened online on March 29, collected $554,000 in a week, and then closed.

That might draw Agatha’s attention, too. There’s no upper limit to legal expenses, so why would anyone close a legal defense fund to new contributions?

If this was happening in a novel, readers might suspect that the rapid-response money flow was a clue that these now former FBI officials knew something, and somebody was directing cash to them to buy their silence.

In fact, not fiction, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe know quite a lot. They were at the helm of investigations into whether Hillary Clinton broke the law with her unique private email server for official, sometimes classified, correspondence and whether the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government to win the presidential election.

Both of these investigations have been the subject of an internal Justice Department investigation by the Office of Inspector General. The IG probe uncovered texts sent by Strzok that showed such intense bias against Trump that Strzok was removed from his job working on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and reassigned.

Strzok was on the Mueller investigation because he had been heading up the Russia investigation that the FBI began earlier, in 2016. He went straight from working on the Clinton email case to leading the Russia inquiry.

So it caught everyone’s attention when an August 2016 text uncovered by the IG probe featured Strzok vowing to stop Donald Trump from being elected president.

The inspector general’s investigation into the FBI’s Trump investigation is still ongoing.

Maybe something turned up, because this week, Peter Strzok was abruptly fired from his 22-year job at the FBI. He released a letter from his attorneys complaining that in making the decision to terminate him, the deputy director of the FBI had effectively overruled an internal disciplinary panel’s recommendation that Strzok should merely be suspended and demoted.

That’s some character reference.

A high-level job at the FBI isn’t like a high-level job anyplace else. An FBI investigation, backed by virtually unlimited resources, can wreck the life and drain the finances out of anybody who’s accused of violating federal law, even without anyone being convicted or even formally charged. If that power is misused for political purposes, it’s a problem.

It’s also the subject of new book, not by Agatha Christie but by Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, titled, “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.”

In June, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long-awaited report on the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified material with her private email setup. Horowitz concluded that Strzok’s clear bias, while troubling, did not affect the decisions made in the Clinton investigation. However, he said he had not reached the same conclusion about the effect of Strzok’s bias on decisions made in the Trump investigation.

One of these days, the next chapter will be completed. The inspector general’s report on the FBI’s investigation into the alleged Trump-Russia collusion will be released to the Congress and the public.

And then we’ll see what 450 investigators working for the inspector general managed to uncover.

Did someone at the FBI or in the Justice Department cook up a plot in 2016 to frame Donald Trump with a phony, politically motivated investigation that continues to this day?